Texas

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Five boats sank in a Texas lake during a nautical parade in support of President Donald Trump as tightly packed boats created large waves, officials said Sunday.

Boaters began calling for help “almost immediately” after the procession for Trump’s reelection got underway on a lake west of Austin on Saturday, according to Kristen Dark of the Travis County Sheriff’s Office. Deputies ultimately responded to 15 distress calls and received three other reports of boats taking on water. No one was injured or killed.

HOUSTON (AP) — The Trump administration has sharply increased its use of hotels to detain immigrant children as young as 1 before expelling them from the United States during the coronavirus pandemic despite facing outcry from lawmakers and human-rights advocates.

Federal authorities said they detained 577 unaccompanied children in hotels through the end of July, up from 240 in April, May and June, according to a report published late Wednesday from a court-appointed monitor for detained immigrant youth.

GALVESTON, Texas (AP) — In the largest U.S. evacuation of the pandemic, more than half a million people were ordered to flee the Gulf Coast on Tuesday as Laura strengthened into a hurricane that forecasters said could slam Texas and Louisiana with ferocious winds, heavy flooding and the power to push seawater miles inland.

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (AP) — The bodies of two missing crew members of a dredging boat were found Saturday following an explosion a day earlier in the Port of Corpus Christi in Texas, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

Two other crew members of the dredging vessel Waymon L Boyd remain missing and the search for them continues, Coast Guard Capt. Jason Gunning said during a Saturday afternoon news conference.

(AP) --- Two newly formed tropical storms could become almost simultaneous threats to the U.S. Gulf Coast early next week. They could even get sucked into an odd dance around each other. Or they could fall apart as they soak the Caribbean and Mexico this weekend.

Tropical storms Laura and Marco have such bad and good environments ahead of them that their futures were not clear late Friday. Computer forecast models varied so much that some saw Laura becoming a major hurricane nearing the U.S., while others saw it dissipating.

HOUSTON, Aug 20 (NNN-XINHUA) – A massive fire that broke out overnight at a plastics plant near U.S. Texas city of Dallas is likely to burn for days, officials said.

Local fire department officials said, the fire started around midnight at a plastic plant in Grand Prairie, about 21 kilometres west of Dallas, when a power line fell onto a storage area containing plastic sheeting.

Grand Prairie Fire Department Assistant Chief, Bill Murphy, said, one of the rail cars caught fire and then the fire spread, adding that no injuries have been reported.

(AP) --- Three police officers were shot and a man remained barricaded inside a home with three of his family members in a suburb of Austin, Texas, authorities said.

Officers responded to a call about 3:10 p.m. at a home off Natalie Cove from a mother who said her son kicked in the door of the home, Interim Chief of Police Mike Harmon said during a news conference near the scene.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Anyone can get a coronavirus test at the CentroMed clinic in San Antonio, but on a recent day, the drive-thru was empty. Finally two masked people in a maroon SUV pulled straight on through with no wait.

With hundreds of deaths reported each day, students returning to class and football teams charging ahead with plans to play, Texas leaders who grappled with testing shortages for much of the pandemic are now facing the opposite problem: not enough takers.

“We’re not having enough people step forward,” Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said.

HOUSTON, Aug 15 (NNN-AGENCIES) – U.S. state of New Mexico, has the highest rate of alcohol-related deaths in the country, the state’s Department of Health announced yesterday.

The department said, a new study by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, looked at data over four years ending in 2015. Researchers found that people from New Mexico died, related to alcohol, at a rate of 52.3 per 100,000 people. That was almost twice the U.S. average of 27.4.

The state that ranked close to New Mexico was Montana with a death rate of 37.4, said the research.

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The staggering videos from the Lebanese capital are grimly familiar to Tommy Muska thousands of miles away in Texas: a towering blast, a thundering explosion and shock waves demolishing buildings with horrifying speed.

It is what the mayor of West, Texas, lived seven years ago when one of the deadliest fertilizer plant explosions in U.S. history partly leveled his rural town. On Wednesday, Muska also couldn’t shake a familiar feeling — that yet again, no lessons will be learned.